February 04, 2005
When do we forgive? When don't we?
In "Remembering Phillip Johnson" Anne Applebaum wonders why someone's Nazi sympathies isn't always a disqualification.
But his death makes me think that the rest of us should occasionally reflect a bit harder about why we find it so easy to condemn the likes of Prince Harry, a silly, thoughtless boy, and so hard to condemn Philip Johnson, a brilliant, witty aesthete. Or why it was thought scandalous when an allegedly anti-Semitic Ukrainian businessman was allowed to ride on Colin Powell's plane to Kiev last week, while Johnson, who once wrote a positive review of "Mein Kampf," lectured at Harvard University. Or why the Nuremberg tribunal didn't impose the death penalty on the urbane Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, or why the Academy Awards ceremony in 2004 solemnly noted the death of Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's filmmaker, or why Herbert von Karajan, a Nazi Party member who never apologized at all -- party membership, he once said, "advanced my career" -- continued to conduct orchestras in all the great concert halls of Europe. We may think we believe any affiliation with Nazism is wrong, but as a society, our actual definition of "collaboration" is in fact quite slippery.
I remember a few years ago the EEO office at work put up a display for Women's History Month. I was shocked and offended that one of the women honored was Leni Riefenstahl. I left an irate message on the voice mail of the EEO office and they changed it and put up a sign that they hadn't intended to offend anyone. (They put up Margaret Bourke-White instead, I think.) But what were they thinking? Riefenstahl didn't kill anyone, as far as I know and wasn't even charged with war crimes but she was "Hitler's fillmaker" producing propaganda to bolster the Nazi regime.
(The materials for the display came from a clearinghouse, so the ignorance wasn't simply a function of the local EEO office's ignorance. Anyone purchasing the materials would have gotten Riefenstahl.)
And why isn't support for Nazism a disqualifying sin when it comes to "peacemakers?" Mahmoud Abbas didn't just dally with Holocaust denial, he wrote his "thesis" on the subject? Holocaust denial made Austria a pariah because it included Joerg Haider in its government.
Applebaum concludes:
In the end, I suspect the explanation is simple: People whose gifts lie in esoteric fields get a pass that others don't. Or, to put it differently, if you use crude language and wear a swastika, you're a pariah. But if you make up a complex, witty persona, use irony and jokes to brush off hard questions, and construct an elaborate philosophy to obfuscate your past, then you're an elder statesman, a trendsetter, a provocateur and -- most tantalizingly -- an enigma.
Seems reasonable to me. Posted by SoccerDad at February 4, 2005 06:37 AM | TrackBack